Literary criticism examining the way poetic description gives multiple meanings to the objects it scrutinizes in contrast to factual inscriptive and prescriptive statements.

Reviews

“[The author’s] study of this ‘poeticity’ of description will become required reading for those studying the elusive distinction between ‘prose’ and ‘poetry’, for what he presents in this book is a way of overcoming that traditional dichotomy, and in the process, [gains] an understanding of the full production of textual meaning, which is not simply mimetic, but also, essentially, semiotic.”
-Prof. Vincent Aurora,
Columbia University

“[The author’s] book is an important contribution to nineteenth-century French literature and to the study and the rehabilitation of a too-long-scorned and neglected figure of speech widely used at that time.”
-Prof. Philip Laplace,
University of France-Comte